Sheryl Kirby

We All Know Where the Rainbow Goes…

I’m eating chocolates and it’s bittersweet. I had been craving “box o’ chocolates” (as opposed to the swank organic, fair-trade, single-origin stuff I usually eat) and grabbed a box of Pot of Gold the other day. They’re getting hard to find.

The Pot of Gold brand was developed in the 1920s by a confectionery company in Halifax, Nova Scotia called Moir’s. Moir’s had started in 1815 as a bakery, but by 1873 was exclusively making candy and chocolates. Moir’s was actually the first company to come up with a mixed assortment box, and the Pot of Gold was an instant hit, becoming and remaining the best-selling boxed chocolate in Canada for decades. In most of the Maritimes, it wasn’t Christmas without at least one box under the tree, although you might also find rival Ganong as well.

Moir’s was sold to Nabisco brands in 1967 and in 1975, moved across the harbour from their location on Argyle Street in Halifax, to a modernized plant in Dartmouth. Hershey acquired the Nabisco confectionery division in 1987 and expanded the Pot of Gold line to a variety of different assortments.

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Here’s to Your Health

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We arrived at the Canadian Health Food Association’s Expo East shortly after 9am with the assumption that we’d breeze through the trade show in a couple of hours. Even when we hit the floor and realized just how many exhibitors there were, we were still optimistic. Four hours later, we stumbled from the Toronto Convention Centre, laden down with bags of brochures, samples and assorted giveaway items. We had wondered why so many people were showing up with empty rolling suitcases – it was to carry home their swag. And we only looked at the food – fully a third of the exhibitors were there promoting either various forms of protein powders and energy bars or other health food items such as cosmetics.

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Black Creek Pioneer Village

A couple of weeks ago, Greg and I went to Black Creek Pioneer Village for their first annual beer festival. It was a bit of a trek by TTC (about an hour and twenty minutes each way), but that you can even get there at all by public transportation is kind of cool. Not getting out to the ‘burbs all that much, I sort of expected the village to be in the wilderness, but it’s bounded by Jane Street, Steeles Avenue and the York University campus. But the village itself is secluded and genuinely feels as if you’ve gone back in time. Based around the original farm buildings from the mid-1800s, many of the other buildings came from other areas of Toronto and Ontario and were all put together in the 1960s to form a park. It’s a favourite with school groups, as would be expected.

I didn’t take a lot of photos of the buildings, but more of the flora and fauna we encountered.

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Why the Internet Needs Smell-O-Vision

This is really one of those posts that I’m creating for myself as a future surprise. Four or five months from now, in the dark, grey, depressing days of late winter, when everything is covered in that layer of crusty road salt and the promise of spring in not yet in the air, I will be sitting here at my computer, listlessly killing time while I’m supposed to be doing something productive, and I will come across this post, and I will remember.

The last bouquet of summer sweet peas, bought at the farmer’s market from the sweet family who run the apiary and primarily sell honey. I nestled the small bouquet into a bag containing a bunch of basil to protect them from getting bumped and bruised by things like apples and potatoes.

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No Cupcake For You

Today on Serious Eats, Ed Levine mentions a piece in The New York Times about a crackdown on parents sending kids to school with cupcakes for birthday celebrations.Apparently, in an effort to stave off childhood obesity, cupcakes are now forbidden.

Folks in the comments section bring up some relevant issues, such as:

How can schools get away with selling/providing pizza and french fries in the cafeterias, yet ban occasional treats?
If you’re banning cupcakes, does that mean kids are going to stop selling candy bars or Girl Guide cookies as fundraisers?
Maybe sending kids to school with a healthy lunch as opposed to cash to spend at McDonald’s every day would mean the occasional cupcake would actually be okay.

The thing to consider is that in the original case, in a Texas suburb, every child was bringing cupcakes for the class on their own birthday. Over the course of the year, that’s a whole lotta cupcakes. It’s also creates a mini class-system within the school; kids whose families cannot afford to supply the class with treats, kids whose parents send store-bought cupcakes instead of homemade, or kids whose birthdays fall outside of the school year, are all kinda screwed in the cupcake wars.

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You Should Just Buy

I was at the corner store a few minutes ago, buying baklava to have with tea, when I discovered myself in line at the cash in between two separate men buying multiple bags of injera, the Ethiopian bread.

Because I am my father’s daughter and have picked up the habit of chatting to strangers, I joked to the guy behind me, “Is this as good as homemade?”

Apparently Ethiopian folks who have immigrated to Canada don’t make their own injera. The mitad, the flat pan the bread is cooked on, doesn’t fit on our traditional stovetops. In faltering English he also said, “it’s also hard… to get right… when it is prepared…”

“When it’s fermenting?” I asked. His face lit up.

“I’ve always wanted to try and make it, ” I said. “My husband and I eat Ethiopian food a lot.”

He shook his head. “Even our ladies have hard time. You should just buy.”

Now I want to try it more than ever. But the teff, the grain used in injera, is expensive, so I’m worried about screwing it up. Maybe I should just keep buying my injera at the Hasty Market. If it’s good enough for the local Ethiopians, who am I to argue?

The Holiday That Canada Gave the World

The Labour Day parade goes right by our apartment. It’s senseless to try and ignore it – it’s loud and raucous and it takes a full two and a half hours for all 25,000 marchers to go past. That’s the right number of 0s there. Crazy, huh?

Parade marchers get into the Canadian National Exhibition (the finish point of the parade) for free on Labour day. Many groups had extras of the wristbands that are given to marchers and were handing them out to people watching the parade at the end of the route where we were. We were offered wristbands a half dozen times – next year we’ll plan on taking some and joining the crowd.

What I didn’t know was that Labour Day actually started in Toronto, but apparently this was the first place where people marched, in 1872. There’s a long history of the city being a “union-town” and with so much history, it’s easy to understand why.

People marched with their kids and dogs and families. Almost all unions had snazzy matching shirts or even jackets. There were plenty of bands, especially steel drum bands. While I still find it hard to muster up sympathy for things like the recent job cuts that will affect unions like CAW (Canadian Auto Workers) because I really believe there should be fewer cars on the road, I grew up in a union household (both my parents belonged to unions, as did I at my first job working at a hospital), so for the most part, I believe and agree with the presence and power of the unions.

The parade is really a celebration of humanity and what people can achieve when they pull together. Our society owes a lot to the work of unions, and while they’re not always perfect, they do a lot to make our quality of life one of the best in the world.

Who Picked Your Produce

I’ve had this piece from Chow: The Grinder bookmarked for a couple of weeks now, and I’ve been meaning to discuss it.

In a development that’s surprised exactly no one, fruits and vegetables are rotting in fields across the United States after a crackdown on illegal immigration.

It interests me because of the issues surrounding illegal immigration, but also in part because of the point of view many people involved in the local food movement take toward farmer’s markets, assuming that if the farmer is at market then nothing is being harvest back at the farm.
We seem to be of the belief that the farmer we buy the apple from is the same person who picked the apple. The truth is that almost all farmers, both here in Canada and in the US, rely completely on the use of seasonal or immigrant workers (both legal and illegal) to harvest their crops.

In the US south and California, those workers are mostly illegal immigrants from Mexico. Here in Canada, the pickers are (mostly) Jamaican and arrive in the country with specific work permits. The apple farms in Ontario’s Norfolk county rely heavily on Jamaican pickers, and the tobacco kills from these former tobacco farms have been renovated and turned into housing for seasonal workers.

In both countries, we owe our cheap food prices to the fact that there are people willing to work for minimum wage (or less) to do the back-breaking work that no one else is interested in doing.

Something to remember the next time you bite into an apple.

The High School Reunion

A friend sent me a link to photos of my high school reunion last year. I didn’t attend, didn’t even know about it until months after the fact, but it’s still left me feeling very uneasy and odd. I’m not sure I would have attended, to tell the truth, even if I had known.

I was a bit of an outcast in high school; the fat girl, the punk freak. I didn’t really fit in anywhere, and spent more time hanging out with friends from another local high school than I did my own. The day they handed me that diploma was the last I saw of my high school friends. When I got on a plane a year later and moved a thousand miles away, that was pretty much the last I heard from anyone.

Twenty years later, Facebook has allowed people to find each other very easily and I’ve been in contact with a couple of people who I genuinely liked back then. It’s been fun to reconnect, learn about each others’ lives and make plans to meet up the next time I’m home.

But these were the few people I liked and trusted. I’m not sure how I feel about my own personal “mean girls”.

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Out of Africa

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One of the coolest things about Toronto’s many cultural neighbourhoods is how they’ve evolved over the years. One group of immigrants moves out, another moves in to create their own community in their new home. During years of overlap, communities exist side by side and somewhat intertwined.

The most recent example of this cultural mosaic is Bloorcourt Village. This short stretch of Bloor Street West from Christie Pits park to Ossington Avenue was at first a predominantly Greek neighbourhood, pre-dating Greektown on the Danforth. Some vestiges of this still remain in the area today with restaurants such as Menalon (841 Bloor Street West) and Astoria Athens Restaurant (865 Bloor Street West) serving up traditional Greek cuisine and the quaint Greek Corner Grocery (859 Bloor Street West) still selling tins of olive oil from home.

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